


Juice

by Fly



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Aerith likes Cloud for who he is, Awkward First Times, Bad Boy fetishism, Bathing/Washing, Body Image, Body Worship, Canon - Original Game, Casual Sex, Cloud Strife's Hair, Corel Prison, Desertpunk, Environmentalism, F/M, Female Gaze, Hair Washing, Identity Issues, Loss of Virginity, Massage, Metafiction, Missing Scene, Mood Whiplash, Naked Male Clothed Female, Negging, Plants, Safer Sex, Scars, Sex in a Car, Shaving, Sunburn, Touch-Starved, Trying to figure out why a smart girl like Aerith would like this idiot, armpit shaving, foot washing, one extremely tasteless joke that I hope you all hate, pretending you don't actually have feelings for the guy you really want to get ploughed by
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2020-11-08 12:49:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20835743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fly/pseuds/Fly
Summary: Cloud fixes the air conditioning. Aerith decides to take his virginity.Incomplete.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> To avoid confusion, this fanfic is based on the original [FINAL FANTASY VII] for the PSX! The Cloud in [FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE] has a different relationship with his sexuality - reading this story through that lens might get pretty confusing. I want you to be thinking of the Cloud who attempted to have sex with prostitutes at the Honeybee Inn, who flips his hair, does full-body shrugs, and hams up his ego rather than keeps it quiet. You can imagine him as having block arms if you like. More even than the characterisation and continuity, you're going to need to be thinking of the PSX game for some of the jokes to work. (You'll see.)

Aerith, like any enthusiast, had always been keeping an eye out for flowers as she went. The world outside of Midgar was all colours she'd only seen in advertisements and scents that she only recognised from perfume, and she’d lost sight of how spoiled she’d started to get, how entitled she now felt towards that unimaginable fairytale world, until they’d begun the trek up the mountain towards Corel. Corel had the same Mako stink of home, the dust got everywhere, and the only plants that could grow in that juiced-out ground were depressive, clumpy things that smelled of turpentine and generally had a leave-me-alone vibe. But here, between broken boards of what had once been a white picket fence, was an aloe vera, just growing in the ground with no awareness of its siblings living in light-starved pots going greasy behind someone’s oven. And the aloe was adorable; short and stocky, with elegant white teeth, and dressed in the same handsome bloom of green-blue as the shadow on a science fiction cover. Seeing such a cute little plant, both desperately familiar and totally new, made her grin; it was like being sent an encouraging message by an old friend.

"Hey, Cloud," Aerith called to him, "look what I just found!”

The regular banging sounds from the truck behind her were interrupted with a clatter and a yelp of, "shit! Can it wait?"

"Don't worry," Aerith said. "It'll still be here when you're done."

It made Aerith wonder about what had happened here, before the Saucer went up. Aloes didn't come from this part of the world, and the pointless yellow streaks paintbrushed along its leaves revealed it as an ornamental, bred for someone to be proud of. All of those spikes and all of that aggression, all streamlined into beauty, all to protect an inside that was nothing but goo. Wasn't surviving out here in this hard world proof enough that it was strong?

She crouched down, pulled off one of the thick, squeezy leaves that she could tell it wasn't going to miss, and split it open with her thumbnail. Then she walked back to the truck, leaned forward, and said into the truck's open window, "When you're ready, Mr. Cloud!"

A startlingly elegant hand in a sweat-wrinkled leather glove emerged from the darkness inside the cabin. It made a beckoning gesture that caused the armour on it to clink.

"Great timing. You got the cable I told you to hang onto?"

Aerith took his hand in both of hers, put in the cable, put in the aloe blade, and closed his fingers over them both. The hand retreated into the shadows of the cabin.

"A weird leaf? I don't get it."

"They say it has magical healing powers. The juice inside will help with your sore nose."

"Thanks...?" he said, and sighed. "You know, I still don't get why you aren't burned. You're even paler than I am."

Aerith clasped her hands behind her back and stuck her head through the side window. The heat outside was bad enough, but the heat inside was like sticking your head into an oven. The roots of her hair immediately soaked through.

"Because you have to reapply the sunscreen every four hours!" she said. "Even I know that and I'm still not used to having that thing in the sky all day. It's such a shame, isn't it!”

"What is?"

"The whole of this Planet's life depends on that star, and we can't even look at it! Imagine how you’d feel in that situation.”

“I don’t think the stars feel a whole lot,” Cloud said. “Besides, it’s pretty typical for life to revolve around something that hurts. Pass me that wire cutter over by your feet.”

Aerith did. “Why’s it here?”

“I got kind of fed up and dropped it out of the window.”

“Hmm! That’s not like you. What happened to staying cool? The heat’s making you melt.” She became aware of a rattling sound. “Cloud, are your hands shaking?"

"No! I’m alright," he said, closing his other fist tight around the tool so that it was no longer tapping against the dashboard. He lowered his face, drenched and pink, all his funny little points of hair glued to his forehead. "Just tired and kind of, like I'm going to vomit a little. Hold it for a minute, I'm almost done."

He passed her the tool. It had started out as scrap, part of one of those metal clamps used to hold together a temporary fence; he'd torn it in half and worked the end on his sword until he had a little cutting edge. Sometimes you got so used to seeing him wave that sword around that you forgot how strong he was. She squeezed it, tightly. It seared into her skin.

"Please tell me it’s because of the heat, and not the other stuff,” Aerith said.

"Of course it is," Cloud replied, in a way that made it obvious that it was not.

“That’s good,” she said, in a way that made it obvious that she knew that he knew it wasn’t. She took her jacket from where it was hanging from the truck's mirror, and laid it out over the side of the truck's flank to muffle the heat before she leaned onto it. “My bodyguard always knows what to do.”

“The connecting pins on hybrids are all weird," Cloud complained. He swore under his breath, picking out more knots of internal wiring from the hole in the plastic dash. “Look at this!”

“Since when did Shinra have hybrids in its trucks?” Aerith asked. “I haven’t seen pins like that since I was a kid. I wonder if they knocked out a bunch at some point to use if there was a Mako shortage? Like, if the supply chain got messed up?”

Cloud turned it over, tapping away some of its obvious sand damage. Then he looked back at the circuit on his lap, sighed, and hooked the pin, like a seamstress with a spare sewing needle, into the breast of his knitted shirt.

"Are you sure that's the best thing to be wearing?" Aerith asked. She was alright, in thin natural fibres, with her jacket off. Cloud, in acrylic Makonitrile weave, must be suffering.

"Don't worry, we'll be out of here before long anyway. All we've got to do is link up with the others, and..."

"Barret, right?" Aerith nodded. Cloud didn't react.

She tried again. "You don't believe he actually..."

"No way," Cloud said. Then he closed his mouth and said nothing for a while. Then, still looking at his handiwork, his voice held as carefully as a lit match, he said, "I respect him too much to think he's like that. He'll do cruel things for the greater good, but not… I mean, you don't just snap like that if you believe in anything bigger than your own pain. I trust him, but…”

“…five years ago, if someone had tried to tell you what Sephiroth was capable of, you’d have said the exact same thing. Right?”

Perhaps she’d been a little insensitive. Cloud increased his focus on the wires, lining them up in his palm; a scrap of dried skin from his bottom lip clasped between his neat, white teeth. He let it go to speak. "That’s one of the things he left me with, you know. Now, I’ve got this part in my mind which means, no matter how much I trust someone, I also just think I’m wrong. That's what hurts. Not doubt or anything. But that it had to be Sephiroth who changed me like that. Whether I admire him or want him dead, it's like the only thing inside me is Sephiroth."

"Cloud, you know that's not true," Aerith told him, trying to be a little more delicate with the poor guy’s feelings. But she couldn’t stop her mouth making a weird, sort of laughing shape as she added, “there's definitely someone else in there, too."

"OK," Cloud said, and Aerith swallowed before realising he hadn't even been listening. "Moment of truth. This should..."

He touched the Materia he’d wired into the circuit and let it spark. From the front of the truck came an evil whine that increased in volume slightly faster than you’d expect. Cloud slowly lifted his hands away from the Materia, willing it to carry on glowing, then lowered them when the sound puttered out.

"Yep, there's no engine," he told her, watching pencils of green smoke rise from the ignition keyhole and cigarette lighter. "Thought there wasn't."

"No engine?" Aerith tried to clarify, and Cloud snorted at her expression. "Don't make fun of me, I'm serious! I thought that’d be the first thing to check! I thought you were going to, I don’t know, hotwire this thing and go racing off through the desert!"

"What, and drive off with Mr. Coates in the back? I just wanted to access the Mako battery. Get it right and I can - do - this - !"

"Huh?"

Cloud punched a button on the dashboard, and his eyes closed in bliss. The longer front pieces of his hair batted back and forth around his skinny jawline.

"Air conditioning," he said, and began winding the window up.

"Hey!" Aerith giggled, hands flat against the glass as it rose, "what are you doing?!"

"Can't let the cold air get out," Cloud told her, raising his hand in a little wave, just a second before the window sealed tight. As Aerith rattled the door handle, he pressed his nose against the glass and shot her his usual smirk, an expression that didn’t remind her of anyone that wasn’t Cloud - the glint in the eye of a smart, mean boy assuring you that you are on the same side as the one person in the whole world who isn’t stupid. Then he released the lock.

She clambered over him to get into the second seat, lay back with her arms raised, and, as her own smell hit her, immediately put them back to her sides. She looked across at Cloud to see if he'd noticed, but then realised the funkiness in the cockpit, that she'd originally assumed was just the smell of the hybrid generator, was really just a hormonal young man with Mako-twisted body chemistry wearing rib knit in the desert.

"Cloud," she said, "I'm going to clean myself up a little. You should join me.”

A lot of good would come from that. A freshly bathed Cloud Strife, just at the point where his own scent was beginning to re-emerge from the soap, was one of the loveliest smelling human beings imaginable. In trace proportions, Mako went through the same alchemy that turned fecal rot to intoxicating jasmine; of course, he might now be blasting out the stink of a slum musclecar from his armpits, but when clean he just smelled more than other people like something that was alive - the scent of, not a flower, but of the potential of flowers to emerge. As a kid, playing about with chunky, fat nasturtium seeds in plastic instant noodle pots, she’d tried to explain that scent to her mother and learned from her confusion that the reason normal people didn’t talk about it was because it wasn’t.

"There isn’t even any water here to drink,” Cloud said. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sick of this heat, but - hey if you’re going to climb over me watch out for my nose this time - "

“You’re a SOLDIER, right?” Aerith said, hopping back out through the door onto the baked earth. “Didn’t they teach you any survival skills?”

“Not really,” Cloud said. “To be honest, SOLDIERs win because they are overequipped by the company.”

“Look, can you see that plant?” Aerith told him. "The plant I got that leaf from. Where do you think its roots are going?"

Cloud gave her a brief, flickering look, impressed that she was so clever, and set the aloe leaf down on the dashboard.

* * *

“Okay!” Aerith told him. Her knees were up to her chest; her hands were planted flat on the ground; she wiggled the fingers a little. Cloud nodded, looking up to meet her eyes, and then looking down to correct the mirror of his own posture. “One…”

“Two...” Cloud continued.

“Wait!” Aerith said. The aloe seemed to be trying to signal something was wrong to her, and she gestured to Cloud to hold still while she looked at it. She tried to imagine herself as that plant; spreading down and down, becoming earthier and thicker and more thirsty. “Just a second!”

She got up, nudged Cloud, and repositioned herself about a meter away from where she’d just been. Cloud, not bothering to stand, crawled on hands and knees until he was directly in front of her again, and looked around sheepishly until she gave him a thumbs up and a wink. She braced against the ground again and screwed her eyes tight shut.

“Uh,” Cloud began, and she opened her eyes. He was trying to work out if it was more comfortable if he crossed his ankles or not. “Do you think it might help if we held hands?”

“Didn’t they teach you much?” Aerith giggled. “We’re already two parts of the same Planet. We’re connected as it is! We can hold hands anyway, though.”

Cloud’s hands gripped hers, that slightly sticky, plushly softened leather moulding perfectly into the creases. The two of them fidgeted around to find a good position; they ended up in a sort of yoga crouch, their whole forearms lying flat, their fingers interlaced and palms lying flat on the ground. He gave her a little squeeze, to say that this was going to work.

“Alright, this time’s the charm. One, two, three, and -”

“- ack!” Cloud yelped, a jet of freezing vapour spraying right into his eyes. He loosened his grip so that the coldness, emerging from the tiny crack between them, would come out more softly; Aerith felt a little nudge from the spell, its weight shifting under her, as he volunteered to shoulder its brute force. Aerith let him; her skin came out in raised bumps as she attempted to grip the spell’s slippery power and redirect it, shift it down to where the plant was pointing. It was precarious; the spell was moving along with gravity, wanted to move back towards the centre of the Planet from where it came, but as it went further from her body there was more chance it’d slip out of her grasp and lose its shape. Finally, its tip planted as deep as she could bear, in a cold sweat from the lack of release, she lifted her pressure off it and let it bloom - but not fast. Not like when you have to spring a spell open against an enemy. Languidly; as swollen and decadent as a snail pushing its eyestalk back out.

At first, nothing happened, and she watched Cloud panting white, eyelids fluttering from concentration and nose running from the cold, before the ground ruptured in two.

"We're doing it!" Aerith told him, her heart pounding in her ears. "Pull back a little - !”

The inside of the crack was slick and shiny. Its inside was a membrane of white ice, already creaking and melting in the sun.

"Ugh," Cloud responded, physically vibrating. Magic had a momentum to it, an inertial force that meant that once the spell was started, it all had to get out of you somehow. Stopping now was like a driver of a runaway train slamming on the brakes.

"Hey!"

A pair of aggressive-looking guys, bounding over in alarm, stopped the exact moment that a huge, fat column of ice, thicker than Aerith’s waist, thrust out of the fissure and towards the sun. Cloud, flailing and spewing wasted magic momentum, keeled over backwards in a circle of diamond dust; Aerith patted him on the shoulder. It was sunburned, which she only realised after he yelped.

"You can't do that," said one of the guys, who had a Shinra executive's lanyard tied around his shaved head like a bandanna. The ID card holder swung back and forth through a piercing in his ear; the photo's eyes had been scratched out with white Xs. "You go to stay in the cockpit. Mr Coates lets you do that out of the kindness of his heart. Then you decide to summon a big icicle out of the earth. Even if he wasn't doing you a favour, that's a messed up thing to do to somebody's property."

"Oh," Aerith said, "I see. You kind of have to do things like that sometimes."

“Why did you have to go and make the ice down there?” the other asked.

“We didn’t make the ice! We froze the groundwater. It came out on its own.” Aerith realised they didn’t understand. “Water expands when it’s frozen.” The two were still sceptical. “Underneath the ground, there’s water - like how a well works?”

The two guys looked her over, taking in the soft line of her dress, the pretty details on her jewellery, and then looked at each other at the exact same time. Aerith managed not to laugh.

"You’re smart, are you, science girl?" the other one said, tugging at the arm holes of his sleeveless bulletproof vest.

“Mm, probably.”

Lanyard looked confused. "Look, we don’t wanna… I mean, we know how it is, you're new and you don’t know how things work yet, but there's a system here and we can't give you any special exceptions."

“Wait a sec," Cloud suggested, raising a hand into the air from where he lay on his back. His shoulders heaved for a moment with a heavy breath. "Ahh..." He coughed, then sprung up to his full height and prowled towards them like a catwalk model, his other hand casually arranging his hair. "We've got more ice than we need..."

"Yeah, who doesn’t like cold water?" Aerith said, pushing in front of him. Letting Cloud handle social skills would be like letting her concentrate on using the ridiculously huge swords. "We're fine with sharing."

Cloud, apparently still desperate for attention, made a fist and swept it across his body before letting it rest on his hip. He tilted his cheekbones upward, a first-year student’s gangster movie wall scroll. "Got to look out for each other when you're on the bottom, right?"

Water was weeping off the icicle's surface and dwindling into the hungry ground.

“Listen,” Aerith said. She sidled up to the icicle, caressed its wet skin with a long, sliding stroke with two fingertips, and then licking the dew off with her tongue - Cloud flushed even pinker and turned away from them all, apparently fixing something in his pocket - “Mr. You-Know-Who doesn’t know about this, does he?”

This got the reaction she expected. The two men, eyes as wide and shiny as skinned lychees, began mouthing to each other. One would make a grunt, and the other would raise a hand to shut them down. Then, finally, Bulletproof Vest paced back towards her and thundered, “do you realise what you’re suggesting we do?” He caught the volume of his own voice, then glanced back over his shoulder back to Mr Coates’ container. “Listen, being new here can only go so far, know what I’m saying?”

“Leave her alone!” Cloud was trying to insert himself in front of her, cooler-than-cool exterior all gone. There was always this desperation to Cloud when his protective side came out, like a child who’d become separated from his mother.

“She’s yours, huh?” sneered Vest. “You came down here to guard the little princess, is that right?”

Cloud’s lip curled and he shoved Vest in the chest. It was a casual movement of anger, and Vest was a foot taller than Cloud; so he probably hadn’t been expecting the blow to land like a soft cannon. He stumbled back into Lanyard, arms flailing.

“Shut up. I’m not here for her -” and he drew himself up, the SOLDIER personality back into place, “I only got caught up in this because of someone else.”

Aerith couldn’t help exhaling into her hands. Of course, she knew there was someone else, and sometimes the guilt of being around Tifa when Cloud would sneak up behind her and pull her hair twist to make her jump made her kind of want to die, but hearing him say this, now, in _this_ situation, just because he knew it would hurt her -

“The man with the gun on his arm,” Cloud said. “He’s who I’m down here for.” He stepped back and stretched his arms behind his head.

Lanyard said, “there’s no way that’s…” before his eyes slid downwards to Bulletproof Vest, who had a hand on the spot of his chest where Cloud had touched him. They both fell silent, before looking back at Cloud with their jaws and shoulders squared off as if braced for a punch from someone much bigger.

“We’ll take the ice,” Vest concluded. “If it’s OK with the man with the gun on his arm, and everything…”

“Yeah,” said Lanyard. “Honestly, Mr. Coates leaves us thirsty too much. It’s not wrong for us to protect ourselves.”

“It’s an insurance policy,” said Vest. “Few more flasks of water hidden around the place and maybe, if it comes to escaping… we’ll last a few more days.”

Aerith gave a nod and an ironic twirl of her skirt, as Cloud wandered back over to the cabin of the truck to retrieve his sword. In the Slums, the gang types tended to control people with access to drugs and prostitutes, or designer clothes and fast cars; but even though in Midgar everyone was a slave to money and convenience and status, none of that was as desperate as being a slave to water. It didn’t seem right to do that even to guys like this.

“Stand back,” Cloud said, flinging out a hand in a big gesture, before flinging his sword out in an underhand sweep and felling the icicle right at the base. It slid back and cracked as it hit the earth; he broke off the longer, skinnier top half with a stamp from his boot, and handed it to the two of them.

"There," he said. They both staggered under its weight. "Do you need help with that?"

They both insisted they didn't, and Cloud and Aerith watched them go, veering forward and backward like something out of a silent comedy routine. Cloud’s eyes were narrowed, and she could feel the weight of his hand in front of her, all that blunt and steely presence, even though it was really just by his side. He was enjoying seeing them suffer; Aerith slung her hands behind her back, bent over to look up under Cloud's coppery eyelashes, and said, "see how much easier it is when you try to be nice to people?"

Aerith's mother would have called what Cloud had a mean streak; it was something all his own, something she’d had to get to know the shape of. Zack had been so without one, so apolitical and uncomplicated and so pure that sometimes all Aerith had been able to see, while looking into his eyes, was how awful a person she was in comparison. But then she got older, and the world got worse; and with the Planet screaming in her head at night, she’d allowed herself to consider that maybe it was good that she was so awful. She remembered one letter she’d written a bunch of times, long after she’d got into the habit of writing them to no-one - _Wouldn’t it be nice if it was labelled, like on a lightswitch - Off and On? The point where you become so kind that it turns into being mean? The point where not caring comes from being someone who cares? If you go to work every day, with people who do awful things to our world, and you just smile at them because you know they don’t mean it, because you understand that no-one would freely choose to do them - isn’t that why no-one likes nice guys? If the thing that makes you angry is the pain of others and you burn up inside with the need to stop other people hurting too - isn’t that the real reason for the mysterious power of the bad boy? I hope you’ve got a bad boy in your life, some comrade in arms, some other girl from somewhere, whatever - you need someone who is ever-so-slightly cruel in all the right ways standing at your back; let your stalwart blunt become the momentum behind a wicked edge._

Cloud was not a nice guy and he didn’t care about anything; when her tongue got too ahead of herself and she'd find herself cracking too mean a joke, saying something that would make her turn pink when she realised the insensitivity of it, Cloud would usually join in and say something much funnier and much worse. The truth was, even when it was directed at her, Aerith wanted to scream about how cute it was, that he would rearrange the world around him to make her feel like a kind person.


	2. Chapter 2

Aerith crawled onto the peeling cushions stacked up behind the three seats, loosened her choker, and started to undo the buttons down the front of her dress. The icicle stump had been dwindling into water in the bottom of a metal canister that was laced around the side with rust; she’d placed it in the door-side seat, the one to the right of Cloud. With her legs spread wide around the side of the chair back, she dipped her washcloth into the slush, and began to scrub her armpits.

"Hey, Aerith," Cloud said. His thin, jagged body was stretched out on the driver’s seat, one knee up and the other leg dropping off down the side, fiddling with bits he’d taken out of the dashboard; he was sounding very pleased with himself but also like he wanted her to think he was just saying it like he always did. "I made - oh, uh -"

Aerith laughed.

"Don’t worry," she said. "Remember when I peeked through the curtain? Now it’s even."

“You don’t have to pretend to be cool with everything,” Cloud mumbled, trying to shove his face into the arm rest. “I’m not an idiot, I know it’s different for girls.”

“Ooh, so girls are ‘different’. We like shopping and talk too much, right?”

Cloud raised his head with a look of open-mouthed protest, then apparently realised that by doing that he had ended up looking at her, and accepted that the argument was lost. He sighed. She gave him a little wave. It was sweet that he was reacting to her like this - her grey, bobbled old bra, the skirt part of her dress hanging off the top of her hips like a bath towel. She knew it wasn’t because she was that beautiful. He really had no sense of perspective about anything.

"Alright,” he said, shrugging - just a little quirk to the shoulders, not in his usual way, probably because there wasn’t enough room. “It's no big deal for me, either. I got used to seeing all kinds of sights back in the barracks. Compared to that, you’re nothing much.”

"So first I’m different, then I’m nothing? In the good way, or the bad way?"

She turned away from him, towards the truck’s corner, to lift her breasts out of her bra, and wipe at the sweat underneath them.

“Just… don’t get mad at me, but, I’m going to say it again: Different.”

“I’m going to get mad at you.”

“The other guys would do, you know, boys-in-a-barracks kind of stuff. Once they all started pissing on things or racing to see who could be the fastest to jack off I used to just hold a pillow over my eyes and ears and try to imagine them to death.”

“Mmmmm, don’t you regret not having taken the chance to join in? Now you’re all grown up and you’ve never experienced that level of friendship!”

“Save it.” Over Aerith’s shoulder, she glanced back to see that Cloud had an ironic smirk on his face, the eyes too wide with suppressed rage. “There’s nothing about being a grownup so far that isn’t better than my late teens.”

“So what was the thing you made?”

The pained look in his eyes evaporated. “What?”

“You told me a minute ago you made something?”

"Huh?" Cloud said, blinking. He looked like he was emerging from a tunnel. “Oh, yeah. Um, I was going to show you this."

"Oh! Cloud!" Aeris said, crawling down the rank of cushions to the seat to his left, and bouncing her body into it. "That's really cool!"

From the hand-sewn darts in his under-gauntlet to the asymmetrical, bathroom-mirror haircut, Cloud had a casual aesthetic sense, twisting rivets into earrings and bolts into paldrons, turning the junk of Midgar into the kind of thing rich people would buy back after throwing away. He’d found a thread from somewhere - a cord from some Shinra body armour, Aerith guessed - and knotted it together with seven or eight washers and bolts he'd taken out of the truck while doing it up. He held it up by one end, letting its heavy motif hang against his other hand. The grid of hexagons and rings was asymmetrical and uncomfortable, in the usual fuck-you way of his style, but with an instinctive balance, such that you could tell the edges of each piece in the design wanted to be pressed together but were bound apart instead.

"What is it?"

"I was just kind of fiddling around..."

"I think it would make a cute necklace, if you tied up the ends.”

"Yeah,” Cloud said. “Maybe Tifa would like it.”

He shoved it into his pocket, as Aerith contemplated the idea of melting, herself, just dwindling away into nothing, down into the ground, just like she was the icicle.

Aerith had seen the way Tifa looked at him, like he was the spinning Planet she was so desperately trying to nurture into a few more days of life, her gaze clinging on to him, dizzy from his gravitational pull. The weight of Tifa’s feelings towards Cloud made Aerith’s seem trivial, like someone who listens to a band because the lead singer has a great haircut. But there was also something about the way Cloud responded to Tifa, the particular way he would tilt his head to leave her gazing at the dark shadow of his eyelashes rather than the look in his eyes, or let his shoulders relax into too conscious a relaxed pose. When you saw them interacting, it was like Cloud was some sort of character pulled straight out of Tifa’s mind; a projection of the way she felt about her own beauty, turned by girl-modesty into a strong, fetish-leathered and consumable boy.

Tifa was younger, and kind of a naive person. She still thought other people, if they had good intentions, could be relied on. But as to why Cloud, who was so self-possessed, so conscious about how he wanted other people to see him, would play along with it, she couldn’t even imagine. Maybe part of him felt like he was her creation, and he couldn’t risk testing the illusion in case it made him disappear.

“I can’t believe the expression on your face whenever you look at him!” Tifa had once told her, sitting by her side, watching Cloud disappear into the fish-stinking wind of the Junon coast. From behind, all you could really see of him was the bristle of that ghost-coloured hair above that obscene gravestone of a sword. “Stars in your eyes. But not like stars in the sky. Like a cartoon character that’s just run smack into a tunnel, painted on a wall.”

“So you’re still surprised that other people can see him too?”

Tifa hadn’t laughed. She didn’t get Aerith’s sense of humour any more than she got Cloud’s.

“It’s more like, he’s seeing me,” she said. “I have to go around, living my life, having been through the stuff I did, and even if I told anyone, they would never understand it… even Barret. I tried telling him, I talked about my town in flames, and you should have seen the look on his face! So I’ve had to go through that feeling alone.” She shifted back on the bench. “But now there’s someone here who experienced the same pain, and, you know, he really knows himself. He can remember things I don’t remember happening. So I can trust him, let him carry the truth, and take it away from me.”

“Oh, I see. Like when there’s something you want to say stuck on your mind, and it won’t leave you alone, so you write it down and it’s like you got to say it. I get that.”

“When I was younger, I would spend every night cycling through the faces of the people who got burned, in my head. Because I was the only person who remembered them, so I couldn’t stop doing it. I couldn’t let myself forget all that blackened, blistered skin - if I did, it would be the final end of them. You know?”

“I get that too,” Aerith said. It wouldn’t be their end. That knowledge was already tucked in the breast of seeds, thrumming down the nerve threaded through the earthworm. But Aerith knew how pain tried to make itself into your duty to feel it.

“Now he’s here, I can sleep peacefully. Despite a lot of things about him, it’s kind of the first time I’ve ever felt like I’m _not_ insane. You know?”

Aerith raised a hand to her mouth and boggled her eyes in mock horror. “Oh no! I just had the worst thought! So, if you’re not insane, it can’t be you who’s imagining him! I’m doing it! It’s me!”

“You’ve been thinking that for a while, right? I overheard that thing you were whispering to yourself about last night, you know, when you were under the bedcovers. Something about how you can find out which person you know is secretly a Revenant, by slipping Holy Water into the teapot.”

“That… wasn’t… whispering to myself…!” Aerith had said, flushing. “Um, it was writing things down, the thing I was talking about earlier. I write letters to get thoughts out of my head, but if I don’t have paper, the rule is, it works if I whisper it instead.”

“A whispered message. A prayer?”

“If you like,” Aerith said, “that makes it sound dramatic, but it’s not wrong, exactly.”

“Hmm,” Tifa said back, her arm hovering around Aerith’s waist, a little stiffly, trying to feel for the right amount of intimacy. That was something that was funny about Tifa - she took her respect of other people’s feelings to the extremes of a hermit or a monk, who would quietly meditate for hours rather than give in to her own need to belong. Aerith grabbed Tifa’s fingers and pulled the arm around her waist, snuggling her face happily into the puff of the side of her left tit. As Tifa yelped and giggled, knocked off balance, Aerith realised that, for her, being starved of touch hurt way worse than bruising other people’s feelings. That was something about herself she was going to have to remember.

* * *

Aerith had leant her actual razor to Tifa, after she’d broken hers fending off a Touch Me that had got into her sleeping bag. After that, Aerith had been using Cloud’s old one.

The reason it was no longer his was because Barret had seen him using it, and got mad. (”They start out cheap to trap you into buying the same again, all made out of new plastic and new steel they get by crackin’ the scars on the Planet wide open! And when you throw the head away, it don’t get recycled - jus’ ends up pollutin’ the ocean along with all fifteen of your beard hairs!”) Cloud had surprised everyone by taking his advice, switching to a Wutaian-style straight razor. (“Not because of the Planet or anything. Just, it’s cheap.”) About six or seven years ago, the ad campaign for Heartless by Sephiroth (top note: jasmine, middle note: lily, base note: Behemoth musk) had shown the General shaving with the same kind of blade; so nowadays, every second-hand shop sold them for pennies, and a lot of guys in their mid-twenties had little scars under their noses. That was the background as to why Aerith was now shaving the tricky bit around her left ankle with an enormous, ugly six-bladed men’s razor that hadn’t had the head switched in over a month.

“I can’t help noticing you’re not really moving, or doing that much,” Aerith commented.

Cloud didn’t respond.

“I don’t want to be too blunt about it, but you need to wash too, you know.”

Cloud said, “I know, it’s just… weird!”

“It’s only weird because you’re making it weird!” Aerith said, lifting her leg to get at the stuff on the back of her calf. “I’m not going to look.”

“That’s not what’s bothering me.”

“Hmm, because for men, it’s not ‘different’! Right? I’ll go outside again,” Aerith said. She switched over to her other leg. “Don’t worry!”

“No way! What if Coates’s lackeys are -”

“Well, in that case, you’ll have to trust me not to look!” Aerith said, gesturing at him with the razor. “Why can’t you at least take off your uniform for a while?”

Cloud shifted in his seat. The pornographic magazine that he’d found behind one of the seats, so faded from the sun that you couldn’t even really see any of the details, fell off his lap and landed on the floor. “I… can’t explain…”

“You're not hiding anything under there, are you?"

"It’s not that. Got nothing to hide," Cloud said. "Just some scars and, you know, the usual. Trust me, you're not missing out on anything."

"But you’ve been wearing knitting in this heat! You’re already making yourself sick! At least take your boots and gloves off. Change your socks."

Cloud scrunched his gloved hand into the breastpiece of his knit, then let it go.

"It's more like, the uniform…"

“Cloud, is it that you think you’re fat?”

“Give it a rest. All the things wrong with my head and you think it’s got to be that? Look, I don’t know what it is. It’s almost like, without the uniform, I’m not… I don’t know. I guess what I’m saying is, when I bathed in the Ghost Hotel, I looked into the mirror on the ceiling and saw the red marks printed onto my shoulders from the straps over my shoulders, and felt like I wasn’t really looking at myself. Like my mind isn’t in this body, but somewhere above, pointing towards it like a finger. And then I realised that’s always how I feel. I just never noticed until I was looking at it."

"It's okay," Aeris said, simply. "I know who you are. In a uniform, a dress, or even turned into a frog, you’re still Cloud, right? You don't need to convince me or anything."

"Alright," Cloud said. He sat up, hunching his shoulders with a look of disgust knitted into his eyebrows, before shaking his head in irritation and taking off his belt. It was a quick motion - barely a second, and done, with him almost throwing it to the floor, the bolts on the arm guard landing with a clang. He lifted his chin, met Aerith’s gaze with worried eyes, almost as if looking for reassurance that he’d done it right.

He did, now that Aeris thought about it, look tremendously naked with the belt off.

"Come on," Aerith prompted him, trying not to giggle, "you take off your clothes, and I'll take off what’s left of mine!"

"Now this is getting like the barracks," Cloud said, his face twisting into a nervous cringe, the faint smirk of a child being told off, then gave one of his harsh, funny-serious nods and peeled his shirt off his body. The rib knit pattern was stamped onto his stomach in pink and yellow-white, like it had become part of his skin itself.

"Excuse me," Aeris said, catching him looking down, "I'll avert my eyes!"

She turned her head to try to stare out of the windscreen. It was so thick with muck it might as well have been wallpaper, so it didn't work. She kept catching the glow of Cloud's long limbs reflected back in the bow of the glass.

“You can stop staring at my reflection if you like,” Cloud said. She noticed the reflected glint of that spark buried in his eyes, but once you got past the spookiness of that glow, Cloud’s mad-wide eyes looked more kitteny than anything.

“Sorry,” Aerith said, lowering her gaze, finding it landing on her crotch.

As she carried on shaving, pulling the padded flesh taut and scraping it clean, she realised the motions she was making felt strange, almost clumsy, as if she was having to concentrate on moving each one of her bones independently. Her chest hurt, like she couldn’t physically get enough air into it with her heartbeat trying to hammer it all back out. She put the ice-cold, wet cloth over the freshly shaved skin between her legs; the pleasant sting was grounding enough that some of her brain re-entered her body, and she found herself giggling a little, shocked at the strength of her own reaction.

“What’s so funny?” Cloud asked, just as she pulled the cloth away and realised it was wet with something much thicker and shinier than water. She quickly wiped up the thread between herself and the cloth and dunked it back into the water, horrified that he might see.

“Nothing! It’s nothing! Just -” she wrung the cloth out - “everything’s a little surprising.”

“Hang on to this,” Cloud said, before his top bounced off her left shoulder. She caught it before it landed in the water; it smelled of him. Very lightly sweet, like what was left over on her fingertips after deadheading the flowerbed, and, more insidiously, of the garlic and cumin from the bean curry Tifa had cooked them in a dented pan back in North Corel. It was a reminder that Tifa had marked him before Aerith could, and the jealousy made her want to shove her tongue down his throat and lick it all back out of him until he was clean.

“Maybe instead,” she carried on, a part of her listening to herself talk and screaming at her to stop, “maybe I can stop staring at your reflection by staring at you?”

There was a long silence. In the corner of her eye, where she wasn’t looking at the reflection, Cloud’s motions slowed. She could tell he was also looking at his own reflection, observing himself being observed by her.

“What do you think you would see?” he asked, instead, his voice strained and gravelly. “What do I look like to you?”

Aerith tried to think of an honest answer. Physically speaking, they really didn’t have that much in common. The other one had been all stable arches, all dependable, even stonework, there to carry you places, to take you around all of those clean and pleasing features and return you home with a friendly handshake. Cloud, on the other hand, was glaringly and disjointedly beautiful, in a way that had no concern for the pleasure of anybody else. His body was too short, too long, and hit the eye like nails embedded in a baseball bat.

On Loveless Avenue, they were always trying to put on new plays - she’d seen some of them, they were good. But people didn’t queue round the block day and night for them the same way that they did for every new iteration of Loveless. The girls in their dyed hair and bootleg tshirts and hand-assembled charm necklaces would weep as she pushed flowers into their hands -_ this year’s version is garbage! The new songs are so bad, the female lead is wooden, the actor playing the male lead said all those shitty things about her in the paper! They added the whole sequence with the guards because they know us fans will go for it. I feel used. I feel stupid for falling for it. And I’m Loveless trash, so I need to see it again and again and again! _

Newness is where pleasure begins. But nothing new can ever be as maddening and fortifying and nauseating as a new adaptation of something that you loved in your teens.

“You look like a SOLDIER, of course,” Aerith said. “But…”

“But what?”

“But you also look like Cloud,” she said. “In uniform, in a dress, as a frog, even naked. You just look like you. Like my friend, Cloud, who still owes me a date.”

“But does that…” Cloud swallowed. She’d thought at first he was trying to do a deep voice because he knew he was turning her on and had been trying to sound cooler, but now she realised it was him holding back something overwhelming. “The thing I’ve been trying to say. The SOLDIER part of me and and the Cloud part of me. They don’t match up, do they?”

Aerith blinked. He had more insight than she thought.

“Not quite,” she said. “To be honest. But that’s a good thing. SOLDIER isn’t a very nice organisation. You wear your rank slightly wrong. It makes it sarcastic, I think?”

Cloud exhaled, and she felt the presence of him behind the edge of her vision move to sit by her.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll let you check me out.”

Aerith turned her head.


	3. Chapter 3

Cloud was machinery for running the sword; sturdy but skinny, a zigzag of spiky bones lashed together with steel cable sinew. But that was hot, in a weird way; guys with those classic, airbrushed muscles were on every billboard in Midgar, their camera-readiness leaving them clothed. Cloud, on the other hand, looked so strange, so impossibly naked that Aerith felt like she’d be able to trace a little crumb of food as it worked its way through him. His eyes, as always, were confrontational and blazing; they met hers with the look of perfect self-possession that a First Class would give a sighing SOLDIER simp, and yet she could _not_ not notice the way his teeth were worrying away at the inside of his closed lips. Aerith understood, her whole body tingling with the disgusting nakedness of it, that teeth were the undressed part of the skeleton.

“Not bad,” she told him, and poked him in the soft part just under his ribcage. He had a line of tension rather than showoff abs, but on his sides was a pretty lattice of intercostal muscles, like scales on a mermaid.

“Don’t ask me where my scar came from,” Cloud said, seeming offended; Aerith, looking for it, realised she’d had her finger on it. It was a puckered white line about two inches long, scored in the crease between his upper abdominals. “Some fight or something — who cares? It still aches sometimes if I’m not getting enough sleep.”

Aerith picked her finger off and put it to her lips. Was that giddy sparking the sense of a curse, a wound stamped in with so much vile magic that even healed it was still trying push the flesh around it open? Or was it just because she was touching the skin of a man as lovely as Cloud?

Through the curtain in Wall Market, all she could remember was a glimpse of his back; just a pale, golden canvas to think about later. But up close, every inch of him glowed with darkish down that mediated the trickle of the orange sun around him. The long piece of hair that fell past his jaw had a tip to it so white and soft that she wanted to feel it against her mouth.

“I hadn’t even noticed your scar, I promise,” Aerith said, “I just wanted to know if you’re eating enough. I get worried.”

“Like I don’t get that line enough from Tifa. Now you?”

“So just because I can’t cook the way she can, I can’t try to look after you? In the way I like to?”

Cloud asked, “what?”

The leaf lay on the dashboard; she picked it up and gently rubbed her hand down its length, so the juice started to swell and dribble out of its fat base. She scooped it up with her thumb, gave a sarcastic poke of her tongue at the slick clearness of it, and winked.

He grunted as she rubbed it into the tip of his nose. “Ow! Smells like grass.”

She smeared it over his philtrum, down over his lips. They weren’t burned, but she wanted to see how cute he’d look with his lips coated in something wet and stringy. His astonishing eyes, all those little threads of violet leading into a ring of acrid green, narrowed a little at her expression, and he deliberately parted his mouth a little, letting the aloe juice form little beaded strings between his full lips.

“You like being looked at like this, don’t you?” she said. Words were the best way to confirm what he was thinking.

“I’m engineered to shine as bright as any other kind of propaganda. This kind of attention is what my body was made for.”

“Ah, really? I thought you were just vain,” Aerith told him. “Turn around, I need to get the back of your neck.”

His skin was bright pink there, and the tips of his ears matched her jacket slung over the back of the driver’s seat; he shuddered as she rubbed them.

She looped her finger up across the back bump of his pretty, pointed jawline, feeling barely-there shards of stubble under the surface of his skin when she pushed her finger in, up to his hair; her fingers came away a little powdery with the unfashionable-smelling hair stuff he used.

“Oh, Cloud, you’re burned in your hair parting,” she told him. “No wonder you’re sulking!”

The very roots of his hair were strikingly dark, the same colour as the unsurfaced stubble that blueishly contoured his face beneath his cheekbones. Maybe even all that blondness was made up, too. Did he make it up to force people to deal with the glare of a 1st Class Golden Boy, or was he like the young guys in town who’d dye their hair as a warning signal that they’d just had a mental breakdown?

“Hey,” she said, “Cloud. Can I help clean you up properly?”

At the stage of her early teens where she would lie to her mother to go to Wall Market, to talk about sex she hadn’t had and pretend she felt grown up, the ladies who worked in the hotels would talk about the way they bathed the clients, and it had buried its way into her forming heart as something that grownups did.

Everything in Midgar was transactional. It made everything feel hateful, the same way the flowers she grew for amusement were always so much nicer than the ones she costed up to sell. But it also meant everything came with an excuse attached; if someone was paying you to do it, you didn’t have to admit you wanted it. And so, as a teenager, beginning to notice Midgar’s beautiful teen boys, she would watch them drinking from big plastic bottles in parks with their red lips, and all her daydreams would be about money. Maybe they would pay her to make her kiss them, or tell them she loved them. Maybe they would pay her to wash their skin.

Cloud glanced over at her behind him, the orange light screened over his pupils making his eyes seem greener. Something in him wavered; she could see the SOLDIER in him looking for a context where he could feel forced, rather than like he wanted to.

“As payment,” she continued. “To say thank you for helping me deal with those scary guys earlier.”

She liked transaction as a game, where you could quit if it started to hurt you.

“No,” he said, suddenly shaking his head with a sharpness that made her pull back with surprise, “that doesn’t work as a justification.”

His hand landed on hers. 

“We should do it more like: It’s the same as healing me up, right? The same way as when we fight. It doesn’t have to be different.”

That was Cloud for you - the guy who, when he used curative magic, cast it on you with the same cadence as a spell that hurt. His healing magic stung, the agony vanishing from you in a shock that left you gasping, like the inverse of a snapped rubber band. Whenever she used magic to reach into Cloud, engorging tender bones, pushing slimy bullets out of his flesh in a dribbling slap, she could only do it by perceiving him on a whole other synaesthetic level of gore-naked that made all this two-bodies-in-two-skins stuff look like the game it was.

“Hmm,” she said, tilting her head to the side - when Cloud slowly tilted his own head to match hers, she jerked hers back the other way to make him annoyed - “how should we start?”

Cloud’s hand, still resting on top of hers, guided it down his body. He had a few, little, wiry odd hairs under his taut belly button, and she treasured their little scratches on her fingertips. He led her hand over the waistband of his ugly standard issue military briefs, and - widening his eyes a little - a little further down.

“Cloud? What face is that you’re doing?” she asked. “Are you in pain?”

“No. It’s a sexy face.”

Aerith beamed. “Glad to hear it! You mean you want me to start by getting you naked all the way?”

Cloud shrunk away in irritation. “I thought that was what you wanted, I guess? You’re always trying to get me to open up and now you’re trying to get me to change my mind!”

“Why’re you trying to make it so dramatic?”

“Because…” Cloud snatched his hands away, then ran one over his hair, with a totally different expression that also looked like he was in pain, “because I just don’t want to make you feel like I’m asking you to do anything you don’t want to do!”

“No-one’s ever been able to make me do anything I don’t want to do. Why can’t you just ask, using words, like a normal person?”

Cloud widened his eyes again. “…Please?”

Aerith cringe-laughed into the palm of her other hand. Then, she put it on the other side of his bony hips, and, signalling to him to lift his body up, pulled his underwear down.

* * *

It seemed kind of shallow to care about it, like ignoring a marvellous painting just to gawk at the price tag, but the truth was, she’d been really excited to know whether or not Cloud’s dick was big.

(They’d talked about it a few days ago when she, Tifa and Barret had snuck out of the inn to go drinking by the beach:

_Aerith_

“He’s got to have either a ridiculously big dick, 

or a really, really small one. 

Nothing in between.”

_Barret_

“Listen to this girl! She tells the truth.”

_Tifa_

“I think it’s probably just normal... 

……I don’t think personality is going to have

anything to do with, um, size -”

_Barret_

“Aw, bull-SHIT! You’re tellin’ me a guy would go

round like that if he didn’t have some kind of 

locker room issue? That’s my view as a sailor!”

_Aerith_

“That’s the expertise of a SAILOR, First Class!”

_Barret_

“That’s right! SAILORs have the power to know 

just by the smell of the sea air if someone 

they know got a weird dick situation!”

_Yuffie_

“Hi, gang! Barret, your sea hat looks sick. 

What’re we talking about?”

_Tifa_

“Nothing! A conversation we shouldn’t 

be having! You’re too young!”

_Yuffie_

“Bitch, I’m 26.”

_Tifa_

“No-one believes you!!”

_Aerith_

“Oh, cool! My mother always said I 

needed a big sister to keep me out 

of trouble. I’m so happy.”

_Yuffie _

“Psst... whisper... whisper... 

(I have no idea if they’re making fun of me.) 

(...Nyuck? ...Nyuck?)”

_Tifa_

“Anyway! I’m not comfortable talking about my 

childhood friend like this, when he isn’t even here! 

I think I’m going to, maybe get my stretches in before bed!”

_Yuffie_

“Let me finish your drink, then. 

(...Nyuck!!)”

_Aerith _

“Well, see you tomorrow. Barret, let me get this round!”)

She reminded herself to widen her eyes and act like whatever it was was the least mediocre thing she’d ever seen, because Cloud was delicate and you had to be gentle with him, but as she shifted his underwear to his knees, she didn’t have anything to be upset about. It both was big and wasn’t; it was thicker than you’d expect from his proportions, but it was still sized for his delicate, tapered body. The slightly reddish, dark blond hair around it was lopsidedly trimmed in the way of insecure guys who’d heard it made it look bigger, and it didn’t. But the shape of it was enough to make her grin - a sturdy, precise, elegant dick, a noticeable angular shape to the head under the skin. Not something that would have won him awe in the barracks jacking-off races, but a worthy and self-reliant secret, steely and hot in his palm under the military blankets, capable of anything.

“It’s so pretty,” Aerith said, smiling into her own spreading, full-body blush. It really was, the same glassy-soft quality to its skin as on his eyelids. “I’m jealous. I wish I was as cute as your dick is.”

“Cute?”

“I suppose you hear that a lot from the other girls?”

And what was amazing was that Cloud put a hand to his head, sincerely trying to remember.

“No?”

Aerith’s heart was trying to punch its way out of her body. He was so sweet and so naked and so useless and she thought for a moment that she might honestly cry. 

“Hey, uh,” Cloud started, sliding the hand on his head down his face to his mouth, “just before you get too excited, I don’t want to go any further than this. OK?”

“Of course. No problem.”

“Taking care of yourself’s one thing, but, what with everything else going on, I... You know?”

“No! I get that.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “If anything starts to get to you, just let me know and I’ll butt out right away. Come on, though -” she shuffled foward and hugged him, tight, “try and let the weight of the world fall off you for just a minute. I’m on your side, OK?”

It took a long time before he felt his body relax against hers. Even so, she could still feel his body shaking with nerves. Against her forehead, she could feel the artery throbbing in his neck.

“I’m on yours,” he said. “You know that. I’m ride or die.” And he let the earnestness fall back, replacing it with his performative, mean glint - “At least, until the mission’s over.”

“Look, I’ll get round to paying you eventually,” Aerith said. “Honestly, you Jack-of-all-trades-ers are always moaning about how hard it is to get paid on time. Can’t you just think of it as working for experience - “

“Exposure,” Cloud said, at the same time.

“Mm,” Aerith agreed, giggling into his chest, “and look! I’ve already done that for you! Exposed_ all_ the way down!”

“Seriously, though, if my clients keep on messin’ me around like this I’m going to have to start charging interest on my fees.”

Aerith leaned back, blinking innocently up at his face. “So, what then? A date plus what?”

His eyes narrowed into a smoulder.

“Give me time to think,” he said, and for the first time he sounded like he fit the part, like those famous glow-eyed boys who used to hang around the Turtle’s Paradise seducing giggling hanfu girls who belonged to them as much as the Mako belonged to their bosses. “When I’ve decided what I’ll do with you, I’ll come to collect.”

She caught his stony face flickering, for just a second, trying not to laugh from the audacity of hearing himself talk like that. Oh, bless him; he was getting into it. It had been hard enough for Aerith to learn how to let herself enjoy wanting people. For someone like Cloud, who had reached the age of urges and feelings at the same time his body was re-engineered, it was all mixed up together with weaponhood, in a way even more than the one that already happened to boys around the time they turned into men. 

That was why he was so reticent. Nobody capable of loving would ever be relaxed if they always carried with them a thirsty sword; which was a shame. For a long time, Aerith’s whole body had been crying out to get on her knees, to be rendered immediately breathless by a beautiful man, to get penetrated.

* * *

Aerith had never actually washed anyone else before - at least, not in a way that had been fun. There’d been an incident a couple of years ago where a bunch of people rimwards got hives from a chemical factory exhaust up top; she’d rushed in to help them as best as she could, scrubbing off their skin and helping them wash out their eyes. A year or so ago she’d been tailing around this older girl who worked up-Plate that she was trying to make friends with - she kept acting really cold with her, like it was cool - and when the eventual night out went to some depressing places she’d helped her wash the puke out of her hair. They never talked again after that.

Seeing as it was the desert, she decided to start on his feet.

“You’ve walked across half the world on these,” she told him, enjoying his audible shudder as she dipped them into the ice water. Her thumb worked its way into the sensitive little split between his big and second toe; rolling away the lint from his near worn-through marching liners.

“Yeah,” he said, a little uncomfortably. She must have been tickling. He was resisting admirably. “Didn’t realise how much they hurt until you put them in the ice.”

Aerith made a fist and demonstrated knocking on his calloused sole, as if it was a door. “You can still feel anything under all this?”

“When I was in basic, I had this one officer who said to always wear your boots, even when off duty, or eating dinner. Even in bed. He said you’d only be able to keep your skin strong enough that way.”

“So that’s your secret?” Aerith said.

“Some older guys in the unit told me it wasn’t real, they just told you that for hazing. I still did it anyway.” His toes curled in self-consciousness. “I don’t know what I was trying to prove with it.”

“Maybe it was just that you were young?” Aerith suggested, massaging her thumbs into the pad under his toes - he wasn’t able to resist a groan of pleasure, and she laughed. “After all, these days, you wouldn’t make yourself miserable for no reason just to make other people think you’re tough. Or anything.”

Cloud gave a snort of laughter. “I don’t know.”

“There you go! Growing up’s all about acknowledging where you can still make changes!”

Everyone’s feet had been mangled by all the walking; even Aerith had been starting to mark miles in shredded socks, putting in insoles and taking them out again in the hope of finding a cure for the horrible walkingness of walking. At one point, Tifa had told her to deal with Barret after he’d decided to lance a blister on his heel and was then too proud to admit he’d done it, visibly limping over the limestone while insisting to everyone he was fine. (”I thought it’d make it better,” he’d told her, looking up at her with his big dark sad eyes even though, even sitting down, he wasn’t far off from just across from her. “How was I supposed to know it was one of those things you’ve gotta leave alone to let it get better?”)

“Do you feel any more grown up than you did back then?” she asked.

“I’m a grown up,” he told her, blunt.

“Mm, exciting to hear!” Aerith told him. “That it’s even possible to become one, I mean. I’m not.”

She clutched her hands around his ankle and massaged the cold water up to the point where the iron slab of his shin muscle pushed back against her hands.

“I still do what the guy said,” Cloud said.

“What, you mean, you still wear the boots? In bed? But why? I - I don’t know what to say, really. Do you really hate yourself that much? I mean, I’ve seen you getting into bed with full armour on, but I didn’t think I was supposed to, you know, take it that seriously. Oh, look! Why am I even touching these? They’re disgusting!”

“I thought you liked that! I thought that was why you wanted to do this!”

“I don’t know,” Aerith said. “I like some disgusting things. I mean, I like nature. I like thick soil. I like sap. The Slums. The seedy bits of Wall Market Mom doesn’t get to hear about me going to. I like people’s bodies. And even pretty bodies are, you know, just kind of gross.”

* * *

It was when she was shaving his left armpit that she noticed that scar on his front went all the way through his back. Unlike the one in the front, it was substantially larger, and hadn’t healed in a tidy line - it was made up of four, slightly curved lines all meeting at the same point at the top. She could trace the movement of what had done it; some blade, held steady at the front within the boundary of that tiny mark, but carved through his flesh at the back in shaky up, down, up, down strokes like an expressive painter bringing him to life.

Cloud jerked; he’d felt her hesitate, and she pulled away the blade in a panic the second he moved. She’d made him bend his arm behind his head in a certain way to get the armpit flat enough - she was terrified about carving him any extra scars herself - and he couldn’t look past his own bicep enough to see what was wrong.

“No, it’s fine!” Aerith protested. “I think it’s cute, that’s all!” She ran a finger from the point of each line to the next one, making each stroke a little curved bump, like a cartoon sad face. Filling in the membranes. “It reminds me of the wing of a little bat.”

“Yeah, I’ve only got one wing,” Cloud said, sort of joking. She could tell by the tone that he was also sort of trying not to think about something. “If I had another one I could fly us both out of here, but as it is…”

“We’re half grounded,” Aerith said. “Brutal.”

She dipped Cloud’s Wutaian-style straight razor in the water, then raised it to his body again. Gripping his arm ever so gently just to signal to him not to move it, tilting her head to make sure she had the angle just right, she pushed her thumb into his armpit to lift up the little hairs, catching a pleasant-awful waft of his boyish smell. “Didn’t we get stuck going round and round in circles in the desert for a really long time? Maybe that’s why.”

* * *

>   


* * *

His head lay on her lap, on her crossed legs, over the dress tied around her waist like a skirt. His huge eyes seemed somehow even larger looking at him upside down like that, even with them closed, so all you got were the fronds of the eyelashes.

“I’ll be honest,” she whispered to him, letting her breath tickle the end of his burned nose, “I’ve been wanting to see you like this for a while.”

She let the cupped water in her hands flow back over his forehead, letting it fade that caustic blondness of him to a soft, dark sand. She reached back into the basin and poured again and again, combing out the dried hair products with her fingers (Cloud made faint grunts of complaint when she found the places that tugged), slicking it back against his skull.

“Don’t you like my hair the way I usually have it?”

“I do! It’s funny!” she said. The aloe juice she’d put on him earlier was making the hair soft, putty-pliable and luxurious when she squeezed it. “But it’s the last piece of your outfit, isn’t it? Oh, look at me.”

“What?” Cloud said, pushing up his body by the elbows - he flipped his body over with a push from his arms and a pivot on his heel, the force of the movement breaking the sleek cling of hair to pieces, before drawing himself down onto his knees. From there, he lifted his head. His hair wasn’t as long, wet down, as she’d thought it would be; it hung peculiarly choppy and awkward around his ears, already beginning to cling at the ends into prongs. It was almost upsetting how different he looked, and she had to force herself to keep looking - were his eyes always that huge? The eyebrow set that harsh? Did his bottom lip always have that concerned, confrontational little set to it, like a violent little boy waiting to be told off for punching his school bully?

His eyebrows angled at her, even more acutely than normal. “What are you going to say?”

“I was going to say, you’re all done,” Aerith said, and nodded her head in a little bow of thanks. “You’re all clean, now. You look more like you than ever.”

“More like me?” he asked. He scraped a hand through his hair, seeming unused himself to the novelty of having it loose.

“Yeah,” Aerith said. “Confused.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry, I’m kidding. What I meant to say was, you look a little freer, somehow.”

“That’s just because I’m naked. There’s a lot of things hanging out that don’t usually get free.”

“No, something else. Like, without that uniform being at stake, you’re able to relax a little more. And not to be too blunt about it, but you smell better as well.”

“I know,” he nodded, “thanks. Do you want me to wear my hair natural more?”

She smiled. She could see the pretty, razor-sharp bone structure of his temples like this.

“Why not? I think it would be nice!”

He turned around and clambered back onto the driver’s seat.

“Well, too bad, because I’m not going to do it.”

* * *

There wasn’t enough air being blown around blowing but it the air conditioning to dry both of them off, so they ended up sat together on the front seat with the unapologetic sun baking them through the window and the cold air blowing on their faces.

Aerith wiggled in the seat. Her skin was glued to Cloud’s hip, and peeling herself off, all shaved and tickly-new, made her giggle.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him. Somewhere in the background there was the ululating song of the sandworms calling to each other in rut.

“We can carry on just like this if you like,” Aerith said, burying her face in the crook of his neck. His hand, fingers interlaced with hers, pressed the back of her hand against his chest.

“...Yeah, this is nice,” he said, eventually. “I think I’ve got too much to get on with right now to complicate it by doing anything else.”

“I’m complicated?”

“You’re a complication.”

“Mm,” Aerith mumbled into his neck. “I know that’s true but I’m still going to be mad at you for describing me like that. Is that OK?”

Cloud nodded. “Everyone should be mad at me. Sorry, but, I just keep thinking about... Barret...”

“Haha. Knew it.”

“Not like that. Like - “ he knotted a hand into the drying jags of hair over his left ear - “I’m such a shitty friend. I keep thinking that I should have been there to...”

“You think of him as a friend?”

“Oh.” Cloud exhaled. The SOLDIER shifted into place behind his eyes. “... Well, you know. Whatever it is we’ve got.”

“When you told him he looked cute, it went right to his head,” Aerith said, and kissed him very softly on the corner of his jaw. Cloud, in response, found the brush of her twist and twirled it idly around on his other cheek.

“How does your hair do this? The texture’s so different, it’s weird.”

“You know, Barret’s always thinking about you too.”

“You’re saying he has a crush?”

“Don’t know if I’d go that far, but...” Aerith poked him. “Don’t act like it’s not true, though. You know it, and you spend all your time trying to keep us guessing about which one of us you like!”

“Wait, what?!”

“The four of us. All of us ladies, and Barret. We’re wasting our sexy young years asking you all these silly two-answer questions, just hoping that today’ll be the day you’ll say something nice to us. And it usually isn’t.”

“Okay, so, Barret adoring me, that’s obvious,” Cloud said, with an eyeroll, “but Yuffie’s not like that. She’s smart.”

“I’ve seen the way she looks at you! She’s only mean to you because she’s in awe!”

“That’s kind of immature.”

“How old did you think she was?”

“Twenty-six. That’s what she said.”

“Sixteen! She’s sixteen.”

“Whoa, that’s - uh. That wasn’t that long ago, but that feels like it was.” He bit his lip. “Looking back, when I was sixteen, I was a whole different person.” He shrugged. “Can you tell me more about Barret’s crush on me, instead?”

“I don’t know what else there is to say about it, really. It’s just that the two of you have got, well. Whatever it is you have.”

The image of Barret’s big left hand tracing down the raised scar through Cloud’s middle, that hand that was so gentle towards things it loved and big enough that it had to be, was stuck in her mind. Cloud’s head back, all flushed lips and soft, slightly grippy tongue pressed against the new-copper-penny underbelly of that huge, warm-brown thumb. It had been a favourite daydream of hers on times when Cloud would go off with the other lads; she’d kept it, more than anything, because it was hot to think about him wanting someone, but weird to think about him wanting her directly.

She glanced over; it felt weird thinking about him in that way with him here, as if he could read her thoughts through the contact of their skin.

“You think I’d be used to it by now.”

“Used to what?”

Cloud’s bare foot twitched in idle thought. “Attention.” He ran his fingertips over the round of her shoulder, letting them sit comfortably in the indentation under the bone. “I know when I was about fifteen or sixteen I suddenly became really good looking, but nobody else seemed to notice.”

“In uniform? Back when that was what every girl dreamed of?” Aerith giggled.

“And every boy... But why you and SOLDIERs, Aerith? After all you’ve been through, after everything Shinra did...”

“If I’d seen you in uniform, I promise you that I would have noticed.”

Cloud, who was still holding the tassel of her hair, used it to poke her on the chin.

“It really is a shame we didn’t get to meet back when I’d been in,” he told her. “Why’d I have to get stationed in Junon?”

“Junon?”

“Mom was so relieved when I told her. She kept saying I was too sensitive for the big city, all the opportunities to get lost... I always felt kind of like it was, pretty much, the city version of being in the sticks. There was nothing really interesting to see or do there.”

“And if you’d been in Midgar you would have had me!”

“Yeah, why didn’t we? We’re the same age...”

“I’m older.”

“Not by much, you’ve just had your birthday a couple of months ago and mine’s coming up soon. That’s like, no difference. Besides, you look younger -”

“No, I don’t!” Aerith laughed at him, and jokingly headbutted his ear. “Tifa is actually younger than you by more than I’m older than you! We’re all the same age!”

Cloud shifted a little under her, caressing the back of her head with his fingers.

“Hey, wait, what am I doing?” he said. “What did I mean I don’t want to do this? I do want to do this!”

“Look, if this is just for me, you don’t have to - “

“Stop trying to talk me out of it,” Cloud said, suddenly incensed. “I’ve made up my mind. If we’d known each other in Midgar back in the day we would have gotten involved. Let’s make up for lost time.”

“Lost time...” Aerith said, pushing herself up. Oh God, what was happening? This wasn’t supposed to get real!! This was supposed to just be fooling around!

“We have to do it quick before Barret figures out what you’re doin’ with me and gets jealous. What do we need?”

“Um?” Aerith responded, tilting her head. “Cloud, this is your first time, right?”

“Yes. I mean, I don’t remember, but probably.”

Aerith’s face heated up - when she’d been with Zack, it had been her first time and not his. She really had no idea how she would go about doing it the other way.

“It’s not like I’m no good with girls, or that I’ve got no idea how it works. I’ve read stuff. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, right?”

“Of course not,” Aerith said, patiently. “Isn’t that the way a former SOLDIER would have sex anyway? Just, like, some loveless, mechanical grind, in between chopping things.”

“Yeah,” Cloud said. “So this isn’t a big deal. Imagine thinking it’s a big deal in this new Millennium. Nowadays people get off and then just forget everything that happened… finally, something I’m good at.”

“Oh! Cloud! You’re the best!”

“Yeah!” Cloud agreed. Then he touched a long finger to the furrow in his brow - “So. First of all. You’re on some kind of medication for this, right?”

“No,” Aerith said. She pressed her thighs together and pouted at him. “That’s not how it works.”

“Well, then I’m going to need a condom.” Cloud carried on. “And I don’t have one... But we can’t just ignore that part, because then it’d really get complicated, so…” He shrugged. “Sorry. Looks like it’s over for us.”

“Oh, come on! You couldn’t have forgotten that?”

“Forgotten what?”

“I want to tear my hair out!! Wall Market!”

“Wait, what?! You mean, the dress?!”

“No!! I mean, the condoms!”

Cloud’s ears cocked up, listening for Mr Coates, then gestured at her to lower her voice.

“We’ve got to be careful not to piss off the neighbours,” he reminded her, and gave one of his head-shaking sighs down at the floor. “I do not remember this happening. I remember… I went to the pharmacy, I gave that stuff to the woman in the bathroom -”

“It wasn’t any of that stuff,” Aerith told him. “This was a secret moment that was just between us. Is that why you forgot?”

“Wait, I remember! When I stayed there, to get the vending machine...”

“I’m not allowed to know anything about the vending machine, remember! That was something that was only between men!”

“Yeah, right! When we were staying at the hotel using the vending machine you’re not allowed to know about, the condoms were on the bed! They left them there!”

“You got so embarrassed. I swear I saw your hair blush.”

The condoms had been handed out as part of a Shinra public health initiative. The packets had been covered with reminders that breeding was selfish and irresponsible and that everyone had to do their bit to prevent overpopulation.

Cloud screwed his hand into his hair.

“So where did...” he made a fist across his body - “oh, yeah!”

With renewed purpose, Cloud picked his way over to his pile of discarded clothes and dug around for his wallet.

“Barret’s castoff,” he told Aerith, showing off the embroidered skulls and dice tattooed on the front. Definitely more of a Barret aesthetic thing than a Cloud one. “Don’t tell him I said this, but it’s the nicest wallet I’ve ever had —”

“Is it in there?” Aerith said, craning to peer into it.

A look of alarm crossed Cloud’s face. He made a faint exhale through his nose, separated a different pocket out to check that one, opened the card compartment and threw it to the floor in panic.

“It’s gone,” he said, crawling back towards his pile of clothes to check the pockets of his fatigues. “And my money’s gone. What happened?”

Aerith picked the wallet up.

“There’s some paper in here… a note?

She unfolded it, and Cloud snatched it out of her hands before she’d noticed anything about it other than that it was written in green glitter gel pen.

“It says…” Cloud began, and wiped his mouth, “it says — ‘Hey, Cloud! I wanted to go play in Wonder Square, so I borrowed your money because I knew you’d say yes anyway, right? Don’t worry, I’ll win it all back and pay you back! That’s a promise! As a token of my goodwill, please have these drugs I stole from some guy. See ya!! Yuffie.’ Then there’s a kiss.”

“Hmm, I don’t even think these are actually drugs,” Aerith said, undoing the staple that kept them attached to the other side of the note, and sniffing them to check. “No. These are just torn up bits of ground elder stuffed into a bag from someone’s coat lining. Look, it’s even got the spare buttons still in.”

“But why’d she take the condom?” Cloud said, letting the note hang limp in his hand. “And why now? This sort of thing always ends up happening to me. Whatever I did in my past life must have been terrible...”

“There’s something else on the note,” Aerith pointed out, taking it from him. “Says — ‘P.S. Big Guard Ribbonsoft? Nice optimism, loverboy. I’m telling Tifa.’”

“What?” Cloud managed, face cycling between confusion, hurt, and outrage. Then he stared at her, expression deadly serious. “Well, looks like Yuffie’s ruined everything. We’re going to have to try something else.”

“That’s a good idea,” Aerith agreed, feeling herself heating up again. “I mean, I really, really like having things put in me, but…”

Imagine the alternative. Imagine having to go off the trail to visit some clinic. Imagine having to explain what had happened to Tifa. It’d be enough to make you want the Planet to die.

Aerith sat up, took hold of his wrists, and led him back towards her. He closed his eyes, turned his head, sucked in a few nervous breaths, and, carefully, shuffled up in the seat next to her body. She took charge of the kiss; he gasped into her mouth, actually gasped, just so amazed that he was even there, and it made trickles of grinning pleasure course around her insides.

“It’s OK!” she told him, enjoying the way the orange light glanced off the beads of nervous sweat on the end of his nose. “There’s no right, or wrong, way!”

“Mm?!” Cloud said, who was kind of sucking on her bottom lip. It wasn’t good, by any traditional measure, but she liked it - his mouth was extremely soft, a little sour in a pleasant sort of way, like yoghurt, and the way the breath from his nose tickled made her screw up her eyes and giggle.

“No, more gently,” she told him, and lifted his chin before bringing her head forward in a more pecky sort of motion. She kept her mouth closed; Cloud seemed to calm down a little, and for a while they remained there, braced, the pink light of the sun turning Cloud’s golden skin to divots of shadow, exploring the brush of each other’s lips in an adolescent sort of way that was, although pathetically uncool, fun.

“Hold on,” he said, his eyes suddenly changing - he lifted her chin and delivered to her a kiss that arced through the whole of her body, a bolt of light crackling all the way down to her heels. He pulled back. “Like that, right?” And his face fell.

Aerith’s eyes were stinging. The fumbling virgin Cloud wasn’t exactly the kind of thing anyone would dream of, but it was endearing, and nostalgic, and what she’d been prepared for, and nice. But that had been like being kissed by a movie, and was perfectly awful. When he gave her another expert kiss, more encouraging, in a way that would have elicited a submissive sigh from a SOLDIER groupie thumbing into his uniform with their back braced against an alleyway wall, her whole skin seized up into bumps and she kicked his body with the sides of her feet until he peeled himself off her.

“What _was_ that,” she asked, blinking tears and sweat out of her eyes, suddenly wanting to touch herself over how much she’d loathed it, wanting to fuck herself so badly that the gap between her hand and her clit felt like a broken circle.

“That’s just how we do it in SOLDIER,” he said, which she knew he was going to say.

“But you told me you’ve never done it before.”

“I tell people a lot of things.”

“You’re not trained, are you?”

“Nah. They wouldn’t need to.”

The bones in his hovering hand were picked out by the light, too uncomfortable and sharp. Aerith realised she was just staring at him with her mouth wide open, completely appalled, as if someone had just told her of a really rude thing that someone else had said.

She pulled herself up off the cracked leather, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, and clung to his body for a while, just to get out of the range of his eyes.

“Are you alright?”

“Mngh,” she mumbled into his shoulder.

“I - did I do something weird?”

Aerith dug her hands into the scruff of hair behind his ear. Then, she straightened her fingers and smoothed it back from his forehead. She could make out the little baby hairs on either temple where adulthood was already beginning to pick at his hairline. 

“You told me you were a grown-up,” she said. “Wow. You know, you really are.”

She could feel his voice through the bones of his skull when he spoke. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“So this is what it means to be a SOLDIER, no matter what you look like,” Aerith said, and flopped back onto the seat with a playful sigh that stuck, sob-like, at the bottom of her throat. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what - what else I really expected. I got caught a little off-guard. Whoops!!”

Cloud reached out towards her face. She thought for a moment that he was going to wipe away the angry tear that she could feel searing its way out from under her eyelid, but instead the hand dropped bluntly to his side as he sat up, limbs stiff. 

“Is this normal for a first time?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Aerith said. “All kind of weird things can happen. I think… I just need some time to think about how we can make this work.”


End file.
